Back to Sanity by Steve Taylor

Author:Steve Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mind, Body, Spirit: Thought & Practice
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2012-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

The fall

The question is why did we develop humania, while these peoples apparently didn’t, at least not to anything like the same degree?

It’s impossible to give a conclusive answer to this question, but one possibility is that ego-madness was a psychological change that occurred at some point in our ancestors’ history. Fundamentally, humania is caused by a very strong ego-structure, with powerful boundaries – the ‘over-developed ego,’ as I sometimes call it. There’s some evidence that this strong sense of ego may have developed around 6,000 years ago, over several centuries during the fourth millennium BCE.

The ancestors of most modern Europeans, Middle Eastern, and Asian peoples – the peoples who suffer from humania most severely – stemmed from central Asia and the Middle East. Archeological records show that they began migrating away from their homelands during the fourth millennium BCE. From around this time, signs of a new individuality started appearing: individual rather than communal burials, personal property, texts that describe the names and deeds of individuals, and myths showing a shift from the impersonal to the personal. There was a massive eruption of warfare throughout central Asia and the Middle East, together with the first signs of patriarchal and hierarchical societies.

If it’s possible to locate the psychological change at any point in history, this may be it. And it is just possible – although I stress that this is just a speculative hypothesis – that the psychological change may be linked to an environmental change. Until 4000BCE, central Asia and the Middle East had been fertile and full of animal and plant life, but around this time a process of severe and widespread desertification took hold. Rainfall decreased, rivers and lakes evaporated, vegetation disappeared and famine took hold. Farming became impossible and lack of water made hunting treacherous. The areas were intensely populated (at least compared to other parts of the world at this time) but now there was a mass exodus of animals and people from the region, as groups migrated in search of more fertile areas.

This environmental change may have caused a psychological shift in our ancestors, encouraging the growth of a new sharpened and more separate ego. On the one hand, it may have promoted a new kind of selfishness and individuality. People were forced to think in terms of their individual survival rather than in terms of their community’s. At the same time, these difficulties may have promoted a new kind of intelligence. It’s possible that in order to survive, people had to develop better problem-solving skills, great powers of logic and abstract thought, as well as a new ability to plan for the future. And this kind of intelligence demands a stronger sense of ego, because the ego is the part of our minds we think with. The ego gives us powers of self-reflection and abstraction, together with the ability to imagine the future. Indigenous peoples had – and have – these abilities to a degree, of course, but they became much more developed in our ancestors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.